Marriage is for men

“In the popular imagination, marriage is for women,” wrote

Zawn Villines

. “It takes significant indoctrination to get women to ignore the plain truth.”

Our culture has really delivered on that front. Imagine a group of elementary school age boys discussing their future wedding colors, as I did at that age. Imagine a series that ends with one or both Hardy Boys standing at the altar.

Despite the propaganda, the truth remains. Along every measurable dimension (that I’ve looked at), getting hitched primarily benefits the man.

Let’s begin our journey with jobs and income. Marriage seems to boost median male labor force participation rates. Married men earn more money than single men, even when they’re equally qualified. Employers also prefer married men over equally qualified single men when it comes to who gets a job interview.

According to Mike Tanner:

• The average unmarried man earns $21,000/year less than his married peer.

• More than one-third of unmarried men earn less than 150% of the poverty line.

• One quarter of single men are unemployed, versus just 18% of married men.

• Unmarried men are far less likely to have a college degree (29%) than married men (41%).

• Fully 28% of unmarried men live with their parents.

However, we should note that married men may only earn more because high-earning men are more likely to marry, as one American Sociological Association study found.

The average woman, on the other hand, takes an income hit after the wedding.

Even when women do gain economically from marriage, those gains tend to accrue to the kinds of women who are most likely to be married (those women who have higher than average levels of income and education), according to one University of Maryland study. This leads author Philip Cohen to conclude that getting more single women to marry would actually reduce the average observed benefits of marriage.

Next let’s examine health and happiness. Married men live longer and are happier and healthier than single men.

Single women, by contrast, are healthier and happier than married women. [Update: This is based on a study that has apparently been widely discredited. Most studies show that married women are, on average, happier than unmarried women.]

Marriage does extend life expectancy for both, but more for men. Habits are contagious, and women tend to eat better, drink less, smoke less, sleep more, and go to the doctor more often. Men’s habits improve post-marriage while women’s get worse.

When it comes to loneliness, marriage hurts women and benefits men.

“Extant research suggests that having a romantic partner has more benefits, in terms of higher subjective wellbeing, for men compared to women,” wrote the authors of this 2019 study. “The primary theoretical explanation for these wellbeing differences is that men’s romantic partners tend to be their primary source of perceived social support.”

Single men are more socially isolated and lonely than married men. The opposite is true for women. Mike Tanner finds that unmarried men are more likely to suffer from addiction or alcohol abuse and to be socially isolated than their married peers.

How about leisure time? Women enjoy living alone far more than men do. For women, living alone means more time for hobbies and interests. Marriage boosts leisure time for men because wives spend more time than husbands on childcare and domestic labor. This is true regardless of how many hours both work outside the home. It’s true even when the husband doesn’t work at all. In fact, wives who work more hours or earn more money than theirs husbands put in even more hours of unpaid labor at home than wives who work fewer paid hours and earn less money than their husbands, on average. As a result, married men have 37 more minutes per day for hobbies and leisure and less stress than married women.

“We propose that relative to women: (a) men expect to obtain greater benefits from relationship formation and thus strive more strongly for a romantic partner, (b) men benefit more from romantic relationship involvement in terms of their mental and physical health, (c) men are less likely to initiate breakups, and (d) men suffer more from relationship dissolution,” according to this study: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/romantic-relationships-matter-more-to-men-than-to-women/52E626D3CD7DB14CD946F9A2FBDA739C.

Women file for divorce 70% of the time. Now, who files the paperwork isn’t necessarily who ends the marriage. However, divorce greatly increases a woman’s chances of ending up a single parent and/or in poverty, but not a man’s. In light of that, I do think it’s telling that so many women are willing to file.

Despite the poverty and single motherhood, fewer than a third of women regret their divorce. Post-divorce, women are more likely to feel “relieved, liberated, and happy” while men are more likely to feel dissatisfied with life and more likely to report their first instance of major depression. Men are more likely than women to say they want to remarry and almost twice as likely to actually remarry as women.

Also, wives are more likely to stay with their very ill husbands than the other way around.

Another clue that marriage disproportionately benefits men: Women are the ones giving up on marriage and dating.

Cartoons Hate Her

just cited a 2024 Cambridge University study Rob Henderson shared which shows that girls and women care less about finding a romantic relationship than boys and men, on average.

In a 2020 Pew survey, 61% of single men were looking for a relationship or dates vs 38% of single women. The gender gap is even wider for older singles. One longitudinal study of 1,530 German men and women found that men were less satisfied with being single than women. Men were also more likely to wish for a romantic partner than women. And women initiated most of the break-ups.

“Here’s another unfair but amoral truth about sex and romantic relationships: women just don’t crave these things as much as men do,” CHH wrote. “Overall, women are less horny (note the marked lack of female goon caves) and can more easily fill their companionship needs with friends and family.”

Now, marriage being better for men than for women doesn’t make it a bad thing, necessarily. Annual prostate exams are also better for men than for women, and those seem fine. I just think it’s best to be clear on who benefits most when we talk about any particular institution or the policies people promote under the guise of supporting that institution.

The fact that marriage is actually better for men than for women helps explain, for instance, the GOP’s brilliant plan to boost marriage by trapping women in survival sex marriages by tanking the global economy. If marriage really did primarily benefit women, as we’ve been told for centuries it did, these brilliant GOP strategists probably wouldn’t need do do all that trapping and tanking to get more women into them. And if these brilliant GOP strategists really just wanted to boost marriage rates, they might prioritize making marriage a better deal for women over, again, all the trapping and tanking.

It’s actually important that men know how much marriage benefits them. That way, they can know what they’re missing out on when the GOP continues to fail to deliver anything but pain for everyone.